The US embassy in Syria has strongly denied a Lebanese press report saying an American diplomat had contacted the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement Hamas in Damascus.
"We deny the story," a US embassy official told AFP on Sunday.
The official was commenting on an article published the same day by the Lebanese daily An-Nahar, which said "Washington recently resumed its contacts with Hamas, after they were suspended in the early 1990s."
Quoting Western diplomatic sources, An-Nahar reported "a US diplomat in Damascus has contacted a member of the political bureau of Hamas. Through this contact, the unnamed US diplomat sought to know what would be the position of this group in case the issue of the succession to Palestinian President Yasser Arafat arises, according to the report.
The US diplomat also wanted to know if the Palestinian groups still demanded "the total liberation of Palestine," including the territory which became the state of Israel in 1948, or "if they would consider as sufficient an Israeli withdrawal from the land occupied in 1967", meaning east Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the article added. (Albawaba.com)
